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NACSA Conference
By Joe Keeney

October 28, 2010

This year's NACSA conference featured U-shaped seating that facilitated excellent discussion. NACSA is generally attended by well-informed, opinionated, and knowledgeable charter school industry players, so Greg Richmond's new format successfully made each session particularly engaging. Iphone users paid extra attention since most areas of the Scottsdale Resort had no AT&T coverage.

Day 1 felt more like a virtual learning conference. It started with Tom Vander Ark describing five major trends in education: print to digital content; sequential to adaptive curriculum; periodic to instantaneous assessment; age cohorts to mastery; and one place to anywhere. Of course he is right, it is just a matter of time and tools. Susan Patrick of iNACOL explained how virtual learning is needed to address the shortage and distribution of effective teachers: in Georgia there are 440 high schools offering physics, only 88 certified physics teachers, and in the last two years there was only one new certified teacher added.

Day 2 felt like CMO day. According to Robin Lake, CMOs educate about 10% of all charter school students. But it seems like they get 90% of the attention at conferences like this. More attention should be devoted to helping make individual charter schools -- that educate the vast majority of charter school students -- successful.

At the end of past conferences I felt like the authorizers were high-fiving each other as they left shouting "Let's go close some schools!" But this one kept the emphasis on scale and quality appropriately balanced.

In the personnel department, NHA has made strong new additions in adding Bob Bellafiore, who led CSI in the early days and was a board member of SUNY; also relatively new to NHA is Juliet Squire, formerly a colleague of Rick Hess at AEI. With the move of Michael Duffy from NYC DOE to Victory Schools, it seems like the EMOs (the "E" stands for "evil") are trying to become more like the CMOs (where the "C" stands for "cool").

In the Edison diaspora department, it was good to see Rich O'Neill presenting on turnarounds and on management organizations. Paul O'Neill - experienced as an authorizer, board member, and EMO attorney - must have set some kind of charter school conference record by having a presentation in every single session block (almost!). Rick Larios - considered by many to be one of the smartest people ever to work at Edison - reported he had just gotten an email from Steve Tracy (now superintendent in Derby, CT) who was at a meeting earlier that day with Joel Rose at the School of One.

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